Tag Archives: MKVToolNix

So far there hasn’t been a good, open place for discussing MKVToolNix-related topics that aren’t bugs or feature requests. Therefore I’ve created an MKVToolNix sub-Reddit where I’ll do my best to answer questions and provide insight. Everyone’s welcome.

The holidays are always a nice time for coding as the world seems to turn just a tad slower than usual and people are that tiny bit more relaxed. I took the opportunity to work on my backlog and fix quite a number of bugs in mkvmerge. I’ve also removed those options and features that I had deprecated a year ago.

Another huge change was the near complete rewrite of mkvinfo’s internals. The goal is to include its GUI into MKVToolNix GUI in the next release. It won’t be a 1:1 copy; instead, the new GUI will have more features. A result is that the output generated by the command-line utility has changed in several ways. See the corresponding NEWS entry below for more details.

An important change for package maintainers is the new requirement for the cmark library. Fedora/CentOS/openSUSE already contain the necessary package (cmark-devel), whereas Debian/Ubuntu don’t just yet (there’s the cmark package, but that only contains the binary, whereas MKVToolNix needs the library & header files).

You can download the source code or one of the binaries. The Windows and macOS binaries are available already. The Linux binaries are stil being built and will be available of the course of the next couple of hours.

all command line tools: support for the deprecated, old, proprietary format
used for option files

all command line tools: support for passing command line options via the
deprecated environment variables MKVTOOLNIX_OPTIONS, MKVEXTRACT_OPTIONS,MKVINFO_OPTIONS, MKVMERGE_OPTIONS and MKVPROPEDIT_OPTIONS

mkvinfo: most of its code was re-written in order to lay the groundwork for
including its functionality in MKVToolNix GUI but with more features than
the existing mkvinfo GUI. The result is that a lot of its output has been
changed slightly while keeping the basic layout. Changes include but aren’t
limited to:

All timestamps and durations are now output as nanoseconds in formatted
form (e.g. 01:23:45.67890123). All additional formats (e.g. floating
point numbers output in seconds or milliseconds) were removed.

Element names for chapters and tags are now translated if a translation is
available.

Elements located in wrong positions within the Matroska document are
handled better.
While mkvinfo’s output is mostly kept very stable, it is not designed to be
parsed by other utilities. Even though I’ve tried hard to cram all changes
and cleanups into this version, additional changes may be made in the next
couple of releases depending on user feedback and bug reports.

New features and enhancements

Bug fixes

mkvmerge: AVC/h.264 parser: when fixing the bitstream timing information
mkvmerge will now use exact representations of the desired field duration if
possible. For example, when indicating 50 fields/second num_units_in_tick
is set to 1 and time_scale to 50 instead of 5368709 and 268435456. Part of
the fix for #1673.

mkvmerge: AVC/h.264 parser: mkvmerge no longer assumes that encountering
sequence parameter set or picture parameter set NALUs signal the start of a
new frame. Fixes #2179.

mkvmerge: AVC/h.264 packetizer (framed): when mkvmerge is told to fix the
bitstream timing information, it will now update all SPS NALUs, not just the
ones in the AVCC. Part of the fix for #1673.

mkvmerge: MPEG TS reader: TS packet payloads will only be treated as PES
packets if the payload actually starts with a PES start code. The prior
behavior led to wrong timestamps and potentially broken frame data. Fixes#2193.

mkvmerge: MPEG TS reader: mkvmerge will now drop incomplete PES packets as
soon as an error is detected in the transport stream instead of passing the
incomplete frame to the packetizer. An error is assumed either if thetransport_error_indicator flag is set or if the value of thecontinuity_counter header field doesn’t match the expected value. Fixes#2181.

mkvmerge: Opus: when re-muxing Opus from Matroska mkvmerge will now write
"block duration" elements for all block groups where a "discard padding" is
set, too. Fixes #2188.

mkvmerge: read buffer I/O class: the class could get out of sync regarding
the file position of the underlying file I/O class causing wrong data to be
returned on subsequent read operations. One result was that trying to
identifying MPLS files that refer to very short M2TS files caused mkvmerge
to segfault.

mkvmerge: multiplexer core: if there’s a gap in audio timestamps, a new
block group/lace will be started for the first frame after each gap. Before
the fix the frame after the gap was often stored in the previous block group
causing the gap to be in the wrong place: at the end of that block
group. Fixes #1700.

mkvextract: AVC/h.264: if two consecutive IDR frames with the sameidr_pic_id parameter and no access unit delimiters are found between them,
mkvextract will insert an access unit delimiter in order to signal the start
of a new access unit. Fixes #1704.

The year’s almost over, so I’m just in time for the last release of the year: MKVToolNix v19.0.0 is out. It’s not that big of release, but it still contains a couple of improvements all over the place — and two nice performance improvements on Windows that people will likely notice.

There were no changes for package maintainers.

You can download the source code or one of the binaries. The Windows and macOS binaries are available already. The Linux binaries are stil being built and will be available of the course of the next couple of hours.

Important notes

The MKVToolNix project’s source code repository, bug tracker and wiki have been moved to GitLab.

New features and enhancements

mkvmerge: splitting by duration, by timestamps or by timestamp-based parts: mkvmerge will now consider the first key frame within 1ms of the requested value to be eligible for splitting.

MKVToolNix GUI: the GUI will now save and restore the widths of columns in tree and list views. Implements #2057.

MKVToolNix GUI: header editor: when closing or reloading a modified file, the GUI will now focus the first element that’s been modified before asking the user for confirmation regarding discarding unsaved changes.

Bug fixes

mkvmerge: fixed reading text files encoded in UTF-16 order UTF-32 that have different forms of line endings (new lines, carriage returns or a mix of both). Fixes #2160.

mkvmerge: MP4 reader: fixed mkvmerge’s interpretation of edit list entries with segment_duration == 0 when there’s more than one edit list entry. In that case mkvmerge was reading the whole content more than once. Fixes #2152.

mkvmerge, GUI’s multiplexer: MIME types: added the font top-level media types from RFC 8081. This means that the following new MIME types for fonts can be used: font/ttf, font/otf, font/woff and font/woff2.

MKVToolNix GUI: multiplexer: changing the "subtitle/chapter character set" drop-down was ignored when the selected track was a chapter track. Fixes #2165.

MKVToolNix GUI: multiplexer: once a "subtitle/chapter character set" was set for a track it couldn’t be changed back to the empty entry (= auto-detection) anymore.

MKVToolNix GUI: header editor: fixed re-translating several displayed strings when the GUI language is changed if the language the GUI was started with was not English. Fixes #2159.

MKVToolNix GUI: header editor: whenever a file did not contain a "date" element in its segment information section, the GUI would erroneously ask the user to confirm discarding unsaved changes when closing or reloading the tab. Fixes #2167.

MKVToolNix GUI: job queue: jobs are now saved when their status changes in addition to when the program exits. Fixes #2168.

Today I’ve moved MKVToolNix’ source code repository, the bug tracker and the wiki (including the FAQ) over to GitLab. You can continue using your checked-out copy of the source code if you want by simply replacing https://github.com/mbunkus/mkvtoolnix with https://gitlab.com/mbunkus/mkvtoolnix in the file .git/config.

The move was done using GitLab’s import function. This means that all issues filed by people who already have a GitLab account will remain filed under your name (by mapping it to your GitLab account). All other issues have been mapped to me with mentioning the original poster in the issue text’s first line.